Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America

Dr. David A. Ansell, the author of this edition’s foreword, has also published his own book about inequity in the American healthcare system, entitled The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills (University of Chicago Press, 2017). How have Abraham’s ideas in the early ‘90s been carried forward and developed by Ansell nearly 25 years later?

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead is a book that deals heavily with racial politics and racism but approaches these issues from the perspective of a white author. How do you think Abraham’s whiteness impacts the messaging and insights of the book? Where in the text do you see the discrepancy between her experience as a white person and the experiences of her Black subjects most clearly?

By design, Mama Might Be Better Off Dead focuses on a very specific case study within the broader American healthcare system: a Black, impoverished family living in a specific neighborhood in Chicago. To what extent do you think the book reveals overarching issues, and to what extent does it present a limited perspective?